What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
It’s helpful for poets to find working definitions. These don’t need to bear the weight of academic scrutiny, but act as a personal point of orientation. I tend to believe fiction offers tools to think about, and through, narrative. Furthermore, theatre can provide a grammar for space and movement. Poetry articulates language itself.
I’m very attached to Charles Bernstein’s distinction between the physical and social materiality of language, that poets don’t just engage with the sight and sound of words but have the opportunity to resonate its social and ideological aspects. I’d argue this is the purview of all poetry, not just experimental writing. What is rhyme and metre, assonance and alliteration, if not to sound language’s physicality in relation to a social imperative, even if that imperative is as personal as, “I’m recently bereaved”? Poetry’s ability to solely revel in the artifice of language, while simultaneously highlighting that artifice as a social construction, sets it apart from other literary practices.
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